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Pirate Party of Canada Promises VPN For Freedom
An anonymous reader writes "The Pirate Party of Canada has announced that it will extend a VPN originally set up to allow people in Tunisia to browse freely while internet censorship was imposed there. Canada may soon be added to that list since the ruling Conservative Party has vowed to introduce a bill that would provide unprecedented systematic interception and monitoring of Canadians' personal communications. So the Pirate Party of Canada has announced it will extend that service to Canadians."
That's not true, if the VPN _doesn't_ use a cert from one of the major SSL cert providers (which may already be compromised by governments) and you check the cert. It's trivial to use openssl (possibly with a wrapper like TinyCA) to issue your own certs, so if the VPN provider is doing that, it's much harder in some ways for a government to MITM (in fact, if they do manage it, it means either (1) they've compromised the VPN provider itself or (2) RSA is broken)
This is why gpg security is "better" in some ways than SSL CAs - no central CA authority to compromise. It's weird that we haven't seen a gpg encryption option for TLS yet though, there's no technical difficulty I can see.
What is the use of one man standing in front of a tank? That one man stood. You would have folded. That man may be dead but he is a man. You are not.
Sometimes a symbolic action has value. Just to show not all people fold as easily as you do.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Having sat on one too many IRC meetings, I can quite firmly state that the Pirate Party of Canada is a joke, a very profound disappointment. Every single moment I've spent on their web site or in a chat room has felt like a colossal waste of my time. Nothing but a bunch of overgrown children fussing over inane trivia, trying to sell memberships and merch, and refusing to agree on any sort of official stance or direction. They can't promise shit, because they're too busy arguing over who's going to pay for the next batch of business cards. Appoint a goddamned treasurer, throw fund raisers and awareness rallies, take out ads in the paper or on progressive TV channels, you know, the usual political song-and-dance.
To put things into perspective, the non-partisan OpenMedia group has had great success in the battle against UBB (usage based billing), by leveraging those very same activities. They send an email, maybe once a month, asking for donations and listing off any upcoming meets in my area, and they have delivered RESULTS! If the PPoC put in one tenth of the efforts and professionalism demonstrated by the OpenMedia group, they'd have far more credibility and pull.
Even non-geeks tend to have the opinion that the PPoC are just a bunch of freeloading cyber-hippies, and that's insulting to hippies.
-Billco, Fnarg.com